The present invention generally relates to side detection of 3D undetailed ear impressions, and more particularly to detecting whether a 3D undetailed ear impression is an impression of a left or right ear.
A 3D undetailed ear impression is a 3D data of an ear generated by a 3D scan of a patient's ear. 3D undetailed ear impressions can be used to manually or automatically generate hearing aid shells that fit a patient's ear. In order to generate hearing aid shells automatically, feature recognition must be performed on a 3D undetailed ear impression to detect features of the impression such as the ear canal, aperture, concha, tragus, helix, notch, and crus. The recognition of many of the features of 3D undetailed impression is dependent on whether the undetailed 3D ear impression is an impression of a left or right ear. However, feature recognition techniques used in hearing aid shell generation do not classify the side (left or right) of the 3D undetailed ear impression as a feature to be detected, but consider the side as a pre-condition necessary to detect other features. Accordingly, in typical feature detection techniques the features can only be detected if it is already known whether the 3D undetailed ear impression is a left or right ear impression.